Description
“Delightful . . . A treat for dictionary hounds and vocabulary-challenged word lovers everywhere.”—Booklist
For most of us, these prizewinning spelling bee words would be difficult to pronounce, let alone spell. We asked twenty-one of today’s most talented and inventive writers to go even further and pen an original tale inspired by one of dozens of obscure and fascinating championship words. The result is Logorrhea—a veritable dictionary of the weird, the fantastic, the haunting, and the indefinable that will have you spellbound from the very first page.
Including twenty-one stories and the inscrutable words that inspired them:
Chiaroscuro: “The Chiaroscurist” by Hal Duncan
Lyceum: “Lyceum” by Liz Williams
Vivisepulture: “Vivisepulture” by David Prill
Eczema: “Eczema” by Clare Dudman
Sacrilege, Semaphore: “Semaphore” by Alex Irvine
Smaragdine: “The Smaragdine Knot” by Marly Youmans
Insouciant: “A Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock
Cambist: “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham
Logorrhea: “Logorrhea” by Michelle Richmond
Pococurante: “Pococurante” by Anna Tambour
Autochthonous: “From Around Here” by Tim Pratt
Vignette: “Vignette” by Elizabeth Hand
Sycophant: “Plight of the Sycophant” by Alan DeNiro
Elegiacal: “The Last Elegy” by Matthew Cheney
Eudaemonic: “Eudaemonic” by Jay Caselberg
Macerate: “Softer” by Paolo Bacigalupi
Transept: “Crossing the Seven” by Jay Lake
Psoriasis: “Tsuris” by Leslie What
Euonym: “The Euonymist” by Neil Williamson
Dulcimer: “Singing of Mount Abora” by Theodora Goss
Appoggiatura: “Appoggiatura” by Jeff VanderMeer
“This book is a logophile’s dream—a left-field collection of stories inspired by winning words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Anyone who has ever spent an hour or two happily browsing the pages of a dictionary will find something to love here.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead
About the Author
NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination.VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.Jeff is married to Ann VanderMeer, who is currently an acquiring editor at Tor.com and has won the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award for her editing of magazines and anthologies. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with two cats and thousands of books.
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